Stephan Sokolow's Blog

Arthur C. Clarke famously said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and, but for our knowledge that it’s not, most people would already say information technology fits that criteria.

The problem is that we computer wizards, being only human, have done as humans do and assumed that the time of plenty will always be upon us. (If you haven’t already read Collapse by Jared Diamond, I strongly recommend it just from the excerpts I’ve had read to me from borrowed copies.)

There are a great many incumbents (and unethical newcomers) who feel their revenue streams threatened by the freedom to innovate and many of them have a great deal of power.

Now, this is a big problem because these people see no problem in stagnating technological and cultural progress to feed the lifestyle they’ve become accustomed to. What’s worse, in most cases, they have a fiduciary responsibility to use the power granted to them by the corporations they head to extract as much profit as possible, regardless of the externalities.

Eben Moglen (the guy who heads the Software Freedom Law Center) has given two excellent keynote speeches on the cultural burden of this sort of behaviour which I strongly believe everyone should listen to:

• Software and Community in the Early 21st Century (transcript)
• Innovation under Austerity (transcript)

The first, from 2006, talks about the importance of free software while the second, from 2012, talks about the power of decentralized innovation to help the economy recover and the harm middlemen like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple can cause.

To paraphrase Moglen, we’re filling our pockets with robots that only serve us so long as their true masters say so.

On that topic, another excellent speech to listen to would be Cory Doctorow’s “The Coming War on General Purpose Computation” (transcript) which he’s also turned into an article named Lockdown. This focuses less on the social benefits of free innovation and communication and more directly on how and why governments and big businesses either do or will want to put up barriers to it.

In short, SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA are only the tip of the iceberg and, like Alastor Moody, even the most vigilant of us can be caught off guard when so few of us speak out against things like the restrictions imposed by platforms such as iOS and Windows RT.

I just ran across an episode of The Young Turks which mentioned and briefly summarized a very interesting article. Here’s the relevant part:

Now I’ll understand if you don’t have time to read the full article (linked to on Salon.com to avoid AlterNet’s irritating layout and pagination) but I highly recommend it.

It goes well beyond the summary and provides a very fascinating look at the sociopolitical history of the United States of America.

Happy Mayan Y2K but, more importantly, happy birthday to me. (Ain’t I egotistical? :P)

Yes, today’s not just the latest in a very long list of failed apocalypses, it’s also my birthday and was the winter solstice for most of my childhood. (These days, it’s the 22nd)

I think that calls for a playlist, don’t you? Unfortunately, given that this blog post will most definitely be around longer than my YouTube account, you’ll have to manually advance them.

It’s not entirely topical, but it’s worksafe, perfect for blasting throughout the house, and loaded with cheery stuff for one of the shortest, darkest days of the year. As such, I’ve bolded the especially topical ones and italicized the little-known ones in case you don’t have time to try them all.

• Arrogant Worms – The Happy Birthday Song
• Brave Belt – Dunrobin’s Gone
• The Byrds – Turn Turn Turn
• Credence Clearwater Revival – Bad Moon Rising
• Chad and Jeremy – A Summer Song
• Shanneyganock – Darby Ram
• Edie – Through
• Enya – May It Be
• Enya – Only Time
• Eric Idle – Someone Stole My Baby (ripped from the ending credits of Splitting Heirs)
• Great Big Sea – It’s The End of the World As We Know It
• Great Big Sea – The Night Pat Murphy Died
• Gregorian – Nothing Else Matters
• The Laziest Men on Mars – Invasion of the Gabber Robots
• Judy Collins – Both Sides Now
• OC ReMix #1455: Kirby Superstar ‘Victory Festival’
• Loreena McKennitt – Samain Night
• The Dagon Tabernacle Choir – Carol of the Old Ones
• Ozzy Fudd (Mark McCollum) – Kill The Wabbit
• Tommy James & The Shondells – Crimson and Clover
• John Denver and Placido Domingo – Perhaps Love
• Reel Big Fish – Somebody Hates Me
• Stan Rogers – The Wreck of the Athens Queen (I have ancestors from the maritimes)
• John Denver – Calypso
• The Cyrkle – Red Rubber Ball
• They Might Be Giants – The Sun is a Mass of Incandescent Gas
• They Might Be Giants – We Want A Rock
• They Might Be Giants – Whistling In The Dark
• Green Day – Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life)

I’d have included more parody birthday songs but all the others in the sorted part of my music collection are either not worksafe or not something I felt was appropriate to blast on the sound system.

Maybe a month ago, YouTube popped up a prompt that tried to encourage me to use my real name and required me to explain why I was refusing… now I just got another prompt which made it even easier to say yes and offered things like “S Sokolow” and “Stephan S” to see if that might change my mind.

I’m starting to get the impression that Google’s end game is to force me to use my real name on YouTube and to delete my account if I give a fake one, as they do on Google Plus… or at least to nag me constantly as they do on GMail because I don’t own a cellphone I can pair with the account for extra security.

…I really need to raise the priority on exporting my YouTube faves and writing a site-agnostic likes/faves manager. Yes, my nick is already my name, but their automated systems don’t know that for certain and it’s the principle of the thing.

Of course, first, I need to move my e-mail hosting to one of my VPSes and set up RoundCube as the webmail UI for when I’m away from home. (I’m already using Thunderbird here)

What follows is a slightly adjusted cross-post of a review I wrote on Desura with added hyperlinks. The writing style is a bit off for my blog but, unfortunately, I won’t have time to rewrite it in the near future.

OpenTTD is a beautiful re-creation and superset of Transport Tycoon Deluxe. If you liked Minecraft for adding a challenge to LEGO™, you’ll love OpenTTD for doing the same for your model train set.

In fact, after spending a day and a half doing nothing but this, I had to force myself to abandon it. If you’re into simulation games, this will take over your life.

Not only is everything about OpenTTD beautifully polished and tuned, it includes a built-in manager/downloader for mods, graphics sets, and the like.

So, what’s the gameplay like? I suppose the simplest way to describe this game is to say that there are two classes of large-scale city simulation games which have grown very successful:

The first is zoning sims like SimCity (Free on Linux as Micropolis) and SimTower where you actually lay out a city/tower/etc. These are fun but do involve a type of micro-management and foresight that, depending on your personality, may wear on you.

The second is business/infrastructure simulations like Transport Tycoon and A-Train where you don’t directly control the cities. Instead, you provide essential services to connect supply and demand and the cities grow and change in response.

OpenTTD (being a Transport Tycoon clone) belongs to this second class. Meet demand by road, sea, and air, buy out your competitors (if you didn’t turn them off), and have a jolly good time in the currency and locale of your choice.

Speaking of which, the advanced options let you tweak EVERYTHING and there are four modes to the level generator, each with unique challenges.

There are only two excusable caveats stemming from its origins as an open-source remake of the Transport Tycoon Deluxe engine:

1. While not as bad as some real “read the manual” games from the 90s, this is definitely a game where you’ll probably want to skim through the tutorial before you’ll be able to reliably get your transport empire to turn a profit.

2. Due to the bitmap fonts and pixel-based GUI, the game isn’t as comfortable as it could be in windowed mode on a big screen

Note: What follows isn’t in the Desura review.

There’s only one thing I’m left wondering. If SimCity is so much fun and Transport Tycoon is so much fun, why does nobody seem to have tried writing the third class of civil/transport simulation games which sits at the intersection of the other two?

Why have I never been able to find a game where your job is to design a road network and you’re actually choosing where highways should go, what kinds of interchanges and on/off ramps to use (eg. weaving lanes), whether a highway needs separate express and collector lanes, whether it’s worth the public outcry to use eminent domain to acquire the land for a given option, etc.

Even if you’re not also in charge of things like subways, light rail, bus routes, and bicycle-only routes, that could be a lot of fun. (Especially if you’re allowed all the fun stuff you don’t see very often like elevated and buried highways)

(I’d write it just for the fun of learning the requisite knowledge about civil engineering and programming simulation models but, given how many other “just for the fun of gaining the requisite knowledge” projects I have creeping along, I’d better not.)